Colonial authorities invested in infrastructure - railroads, bridges, roads and buildings - but history shows that these investments weren’t particularly beneficial to the colonised peoples.
The infrastructure was either largely for the benefit of the extraction of local resources - such as the railways for the Anglo-Persian oil company in Iraq - and were designed with colonial needs in mind; or colonial taxation intended to fund advancement was actually a burden on local populations, whose payments funded the colonial government, as detailed by political scientist Crawford Young in “The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective”.
Between 1919 and 1920 in Mesopotamia, those who could not - or chose not to - pay taxes were punished by the British colonial authorities with aerial bombardment.
Sure, colonialism wasn’t all bad. Hell, let’s bring back colonial legislation in Britain and watch as our local MPs bomb anyone who doesn’t pay their council tax.
Today, discussions of the merits of colonialism are ongoing. Singapore is periodically dragged out in a model example of a flourishing former colony, much like the other, more successful, brown girl in my school was paraded in front of me as some kind of aspirational tokenism.
Countries that embraced their colonialism, Gilley tells us, were much more successful than the colonies that did not.
Is this what counts for academia today? Countries that did not resist colonialism, survived it better?
More fool me, I thought we were in the 21st century, where the enlightened consensus is that people have a right to elect their own leaders.
Arabs 100 years ago were not obliged to sit back as Britain conquered Mesopotamia, and, today, we are not obliged to listen to woolly white men telling us not to resist if you want the struggle to be less painful.
Nobody is suggesting that colonialism cannot be discussed academically. But to debate its perceived advantages while disregarding the devastating ignorance in academia and wider society of colonial crimes, amounts to a whitewashing of the routinely violent, aggressive and racist colonial modus operandi.
▻https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2018/1/5/reintroducing-colonialism-wont-rewrite-history